Private Legal Practitioner, Ace Ankomah, has said the Electoral Commission (EC) can pass legislation to adequately ensure the cleaning of the voters’ register as ordered by the Supreme Court.
According to him, the EC is a self-legislating entity thus they can take their own legislation to parliament to be passed within a period of 21 days.
[contextly_sidebar id=”1TnM5pMZyWdTFpksuRexSYbfhT9aTv58″]Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, the lawyer indicated that the Supreme Court’s ruling was clear on the fact that the EC was supposed to remove the names of persons who registered with the National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) card as proof of identity.
On the process of deletion, the ruling directed the EC to remove the NHIS registrants using its existing legal procedures, Lawyer Ankomah noted.
“This order says delete them, clean it up immediately but it bases this in accordance with the exiting law. Now that is the ‘how’. The ‘what’ is not in dispute? The question is; how do you remove the names and how do you give them the opportunity to register?”
EC can create legislation
Despite the differing interpretations on how the EC could carry out the apex court’s ruling, Lawyer Ankomah stated that it could simply create legislation to make provision for the legal removal of the NHIS registrants from the electoral roll.
“But to me, even the ‘how’ is not a big deal. If you have not made provision for the nature of the deletion that the Supreme Court has ordered you to and the nature of the registration it has ordered you to do, you simply pass the law. The EC is a self-legislating entity. It takes its laws to Parliament called CIs [Constitutional instrument] and within 21 days, they are done once they comply with the procedure,” he explained.
Deletion of NHIS registrants the EC’s ‘headache’
Lawyer Ankomah further explained that the Supreme Court had done its part by issuing the directive to the EC so, according to him, the onus now lay with the EC to ensure the register was cleaned as directed.
“And so if the Supreme Court has ordered you to do this. The Supreme Court will not sit down and condescend to particulars. You sit down and say this is what I have been ordered to do. Does it fit within the law as I have it now? If it doesn’t and you have to pass the law… It is the how that is the issue but my point is that the ‘how’ is not the headache of the Supreme Court. The ‘how’ is the headache of the EC.”
The Supreme Court ruling
Following the 2014 ruling that banned the use of the NHIS cards for registration, Abu Ramadan went back to the Supreme Court this year, seeking among other reliefs a declaration that the voters’ register was not credible for the polls in November.
His arguments were that, those who registered with the NHIS card still had their names in the register as well as some minors and other ineligible persons.
But the Supreme Court in its ruling instead ordered the deletion of the names of all those who registered with the NHIS cards.
It also asked the EC to remove the names of all other ineligible persons including the names of deceased persons but said the EC indicated it could not, by virtue of the few ineligible names on the register, declare the entire register inappropriate for the elections as the applicants were seeking.
It then asked the EC to take immediate steps to clean the voters’ register.
The court however did not give the EC a specific timeline for the cleaning with barely six months to the polls.
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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana